Nowadays, a device needs a Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) card to be able to run an application or use a service that requires strong authentication such as Generic Bootstrap Authentication (GBA). SIM cards in use today comprise embedded integrated circuits and are able to provide identification and authentication. The information provided by SIM cards is usually an international mobile subscriber identity (IMSI) and a related key used to identify and authenticate the device.
SIM cards come in various formats which tend to decrease in size with the different generations of devices. Over the years we have seen Full-size SIMs, mini-SIMs, Micro-SIMs and Nano-SIMs, which are about the size of the integrated circuit themselves. The machine-to-machine (M2M) counterparts can be surface mounted by soldering Embedded-SIMs to circuit boards.
With reference to FIG. 1, the advent of the networked society and the forecasted 50 billion connected devices by year 2020, will lead to the production and physical delivery of billions after billions of SIMs. A greater number of M2M types of devices will need their SIMs soldered to their circuit boards. Operators will have to manually or semi-automatically provision these billions of SIM cards, linking the information of the physical cards to the devices. One can foresee that this will impose a growing burden on the industry and on the environment.
Some documents address different aspects of this problem; see for example WO2012058429, US20120108205, US20130303122 or WO2009092115 which describe electronic or virtual SIMs. These documents describe electronic or virtual SIMs either: being received virtually and stored on an embedded smart card, being part of the operating system of the device or being in the form of an application or a function that is run on an authorized server external to the device. However, none of these provide a solution such as the one described below.